Babbel's rating in the German Play Store is 4.48. On November 9 I pulled its 20 most recent German reviews and they averaged 1.9 stars. Fifteen of the twenty were one or two stars. Babbel's support team had replied to eighteen of them.

None of that is hidden. It sits on public Play Store pages, next to where the app ranks in the grossing chart, when it last shipped and what it's rated in every other country. The catch is that nobody is going to click through twelve store pages every morning to read it.

So this post does it in one run. I'm using Google Play Store Scraper , an Apify Actor I wrote, to watch four language-learning apps (Duolingo, Babbel, Busuu, Memrise) in the US, German and Brazilian stores. The run made 75 requests, took 32 seconds and cost $0.08. It came back with 72 app records, 1,440 reviews and 362 chart positions, and nothing failed.…